The Dismal Science (27 page)

           
—Leonora

It was a difficult message to receive. Vincenzo printed it out, just as he used to do with important e-mails at work. He read it several times. When did she become so strange and wise? He hated to think that she might have been that way for years and that he hadn't noticed. Could it be so? Yes, of course it could.

Though he did not intend to show it to Walter, it was bothering him too much, so he handed it over. Walter read the note and nodded, cast his squinting gaze at the ceiling, and drummed three fingers on his chin. “She's great.”

“I know this much, but what do I do?”

Walter shrugged. “I have no idea at all. Really, you would know better than me.” He glanced down at the note again. “I can't tell whether I regret not having children. I think about it, and pretend to have a theory, but I really don't know.”

“You should regret it.”

“Maybe—I'm not sure I trust you on this.” Walter passed the page back, cleared his throat, picked up the menu, and perused it briefly, groaning under his breath at the awful choices. “I keep wanting to order the trout, but I don't want to get any sicker.” Both men had come down with diarrhea the day after they arrived. Their digestive tracts had been a mess since. When they played chess their stomachs seemed to be carrying on a conversation beneath the table, some creaking and groaning dialogue, like whale-speak.

The three days that Lenka and Evo were out of La Paz had been otherwise unremarkable. Walter and Vincenzo had wandered the city, which was not at all beautiful in the same way that most big cities in emerging economies were not beautiful. Haphazardly erected shanties clung to the mountains around the city. Everything was mainly made of concrete. Aging buildings seemed to pile onto one another on the steep grade—nothing looked like it had been built in the last ten years and nothing looked like it had been built more than fifty years ago. Everything was just old enough to be dated, and
dilapidated. Mostly, Vincenzo relaxed. Walter had work to do. And it remained strange to see him work, to see how chiseled his focus was while he pursued a lead; further, to see what he dismissed and what he pursued. Of course he was good at what he did, had to be, but his casual command of this universe was startling. And, in it, Vincenzo saw that he'd been much the same—notably adept at work, reckless and inept elsewhere.

After that first night at the Lookout, the bar on the top floor of the Presidente Hotel, they decided they needed to be much more vigilant about fighting off the altitude sickness. Those whiskies had turned out to be a grave mistake—that tint of intoxication was bullhorned the next morning into an angry hangover the likes of which neither had experienced in at least a decade. The hangover was
literally
painful—an experience, Walter noted, “comparable to un-anesthetized dental surgery.” Before the headaches began to recede, the two men's digestive tracts started in, and they decided to take it easy, push fluids, and focus on chess.

On a second visit to the Lookout, they realized they didn't like the crowd, mostly international journalists, who tended to get raucous at odd hours, so they decamped to the much more subdued and tasteful Veritas at the Radisson, where Luz Elena—the doppelgänger—worked nights as the bar manager. Vincenzo had walked directly past her twice since he arrived, usually on his way (via a circuitous route) to the bathroom, and found that her shampoo was different from Cristina's. Her scent was sharper, with a hint of rosemary or pine. Still, somewhat inexplicably, he felt tenderness for her scent—he loved it a little, even if it was foreign.

The night before Lenka was due to return, Vincenzo and Walter played a game at Veritas and Walter trounced him with a surprising adaptation of the King's Indian defense: violence and mayhem were foremost. Afterward, they were talking about chess, and how their games were less formulaic and predictable since Vincenzo had quit his job, when Vincenzo noticed that Walter was staring at her.

“It is eerie, no?” Vincenzo said.

“Does she work here?”

Vincenzo nodded. “Her name is Luz Elena. Every time I see her I want to walk up and introduce myself. I want to say something, tell her about it.” Sometimes, he deliberately avoided saying Cristina's name, because when he spoke her name it evoked for him the shape of the vacuum she'd left.

“What would you say to her?”

“I'd tell her about the similarity, I suppose, but it would be too bizarre. I would want to ask her questions, maybe.”

“That makes sense. I want to talk to her, too, actually,” Walter said.

“Yes. I wonder, for example—I know that people's appearance is determined by the genetic code, so this woman Luz Elena obviously has some portion of her genetic code in common with her, but I wonder if there are other similarities. I want to ask her if she hates beer, if she gets flatulent when she eats chocolate. Is she a late sleeper? Does she have unusually bad menstrual cramps?”

Walter pushed out his lower lip, then said, “Yes, that would be inappropriate.” He had a sip of his coca tea and sniffled. “Look, I'm going to call my editor. You reset the board.”

While Vincenzo started resetting the table, Walter took out his Blackberry and called his editor and asked if they would spring for him to move to the Radisson. Just listening to half of the conversation, it was clear that they said no. Apparently, the Presidente Hotel was listed as comparable in quality and it cost half as much. And although it wasn't really a big deal, Vincenzo thought that it was better that he no longer had to argue about such things with his superiors. For all of his professional life he, too, had been answering to
someone
. And how strange, then, to be suddenly without anyone to report to, and to be without anyone reporting to him.

When Walter was off the phone, Vincenzo said, “No luck?”

Walter shook his head and looked at the board.

“I don't envy you,” Vincenzo said.

Walter shrugged, he put his pawn to D4, and tapped the timer. Vincenzo was not faring particularly well at these slower games anymore. He'd become so accustomed to the rhythm of five- and ten-minute games that even a thirty-minute game threw him off. He simply didn't have the patience for it. His mind was bored by thinking that hard for that long about anything. Vincenzo put his D pawn out to meet Walter's, and Walter immediately moved his pawn to C4, for the Queen's Gambit.

Vincenzo looked up at him. Walter hadn't played the gambit against him in ages, regardless of time constraints. Despite his penchant for vocalizing his inner emotions during conversation, while playing chess Walter was studiously inexpressive.

Glancing up from the board, Walter said, “I don't really envy you, either—the empty hours. It's nice that you've started
going to the gym. You were thinking of staying around, flirting with the press liaison?”

Vincenzo took the pawn—why not? The worst that could happen was that he'd lose and he had no problem with losing. “Her boyfriend is probably half my age.”

With cold certainty, Walter swept knight to F3 and smacked the timer in a single gesture, then looked back at Vincenzo. “I know it doesn't need to be said, but you're not allowed to make a pass at the doppelgänger. Maybe you don't want to. Either way, it's verboten.”

“I wouldn't, of course.” Vincenzo blushed, more annoyed than embarrassed. He moved knight to F6, tapped the timer. Walter brought out his queenside knight, tapped the timer. The tapping of the timer was just a habit at this point; at the pace of play they kept now there was really no way that either would run out of time. “Who's paying for your room?” Walter said and had another sip of tea.

“Evo's political party, I suppose. That woman Lenka set it up.” Vincenzo brought out his queenside knight, too.

Walter grunted, looked down at the board again, sighed. He brought out a pawn to E3 then shook his head and clucked his tongue in the way he always did once the game began to develop actual complexity—a cue that he needed to turn on the rest of his mind. It was his only tell with chess.

Vincenzo mulled his options. Walter had the momentum already, and Vincenzo would have to fight hard if he wanted to regain the initiative. In all likelihood, he'd lost the initiative until the mid-game. Now, he'd have to win with violence, not guile. He'd hack his way to victory. Either that, or he'd already
made his fatal mistake. It had been his second move, probably. The best maneuvers in chess, the ones that ended up in the newspaper, were the ones that showed such deep thought, such a thorough understanding of the strategy of both sides, that the outcome seemed almost inevitable. There was no trickery involved. One player did not step into a “trap” as such. What was magical about those moves was that there was never a way out. One had to reverse the course all the way back, so far back that the pursuit of an explanation for the outcome would be lost there, too.

Which was the fatal flaw buried deep within the architecture of economics: that notion that humans behaved rationally. People may intend to pursue self-interest, may set out to be rational, but they don't even understand their own circumstances, don't know what they want, so, in the end, they chase the winds of whim and are ruled only by blind impulses, finally.

The following afternoon, the day before the big event, Vincenzo had his second abortive session at the gym in two days—the altitude made such crusades hilariously unpleasant, and he inevitably found himself wheezing in the armchair near the treadmill within minutes. Breathing was unsatisfying work at that altitude, and panting was even worse. Afterward, he showered and put on the hotel robe and sat at the table in his room trying to write a response to Leonora's e-mail on his laptop. The phone rang. It was Lenka, who had
just returned from her trip south with Evo. She was hoping to come by the hotel and check in to see if everything was okay.

He threw his robe onto the floor and spritzed his chest with the Hermès cologne his daughter had given him last Christmas. He grabbed a button-down blue shirt and a black sweater, the brown corduroy slacks. He put on his old black loafers, no socks, and checked himself in the mirror: his face was still red from the morning's exertion, and his eyes looked exhausted, almost jaundiced—there were huge pouches underneath. What was left of his hair was more white than black now. Looking like the late-life Neruda who appeared on dust-jacket photos, he pulled his shoulders back and sucked in his stomach a little, then he turned away and walked to the door.

Lenka walked into the lobby wearing a black dress with heels and makeup.

“Well!” he said, and approached—somewhere in a dark and optimistic corner of his being, he wondered if she had dressed this way for him, but it was unlikely. He kissed her on both cheeks. “What's the occasion? Do you have to work on the weekends?”

“Oh—my clothes?” She shook her head. “I came here from church.”

“Of course,” he said. Then he said it again, but more enthusiastically: “Of course!”

“What about you, why are you wearing this type of clothes?”

“This?” He looked down at himself and thought of the times his daughter had made fun of him for being incapable of wearing casual clothes. “This is how I dress. You think I am an old man who puts on formal appearances?”

“I would not say that,” she said, and grinned.

“Right. Well, maybe I just want to be ready in case I decide to go back to church? I haven't been in years. The confessional—” He was meandering, saying too much. But he would say more, he needed to explain, so he went on, “I don't go anymore. But I did when I was a child. I was confirmed.”

“If I did not have my son, I wouldn't always make it, either. But I feel like I have to make an example for him. Right?”

It was generous of her to bail him out like that. “Where should we go?” he said, eager to change the subject.

At her suggestion, they walked down the hill toward the park. Vincenzo's room looked out over it, and it was not much to look at: a little sliver of greenery slicing through the gully of the city. Plants had difficulty at that altitude, too. There was a string of skinny eucalyptus trees and some dry shrubs, scrub oak and the like, some burly juniper, but not much else. From his room upstairs, he could see, on the far side, the United States embassy. They called it “The Bunker” in La Paz, because it looked like a cement block spangled with surveillance cameras.